As stream media becomes more and more popular, people have more requirements for service-providing ability of stream media servers. Usually, a high-performance server supports only several thousands of concurrent connections and can't meet the access demand of a vast number of users. To solve this problem, a plurality of servers may be used, i.e., the user access is distributed to a plurality of servers so as to significantly increase the number of concurrent users that can be supported. In addition, as the number of servers increases, the number of users that can be supported will grow accordingly. In this way, during the access to stream media, the insufficient capability of stream media servers will become a bottleneck.
Currently, the above problem is usually solved with the DNS load equalizing method. With that method, a plurality of IP addresses can be obtained from the parsing of a same domain name, the IP addresses correspond to a plurality of servers. Thus the requests to one domain name are distributed to a plurality of servers which have independent IP addresses respectively. Though this method is simple and easy to implement, its drawback is also obvious: it is impossible to know the difference between the servers cannot and to distribute more requests to the servers of higher performance; in addition, it is unable to detect the current status of the servers, therefore, the requests may even be allocated to a single server: furthermore, too many public IP addresses are occupied, which is a fatal defect for an environment with limited public IP addresses. The method of equalizing load on stream media servers described hereinafter can solve said problem.